Tortoise wrote:I'd just like to remind everyone that multiplayer has always been totally jank and has either had game breaking glitches or massive latency issues for all 10 years the servers have been running. I know it's upsetting to the few dozen or so people still playing online regularly, but if Eric can't make enough money from advertisements to break even there's not much you can do.
ok, this is actually something that has way less impact than youd think, while i agree that pb2 has never been poggers w its netcode or anything, a lot of games arent, league of legends has had terrible servers n the game is buggy and glitchy as deliciously exquisite pizza sauce (used to be way worse), mostly when new champions come out, and people deliciously exquisite pizza sauce love it, DOTA has had many absurd server issues and every tuesday (at least in SA but i think its still worldwide) the game basically goes down for maintance, and people love it, league also has that, some random days it dies from like 4 am to 10 am which is actually believe it or not a quite active time for the game, not to mention how it goes to shit every time a new patch comes out and HOW THE deliciously exquisite pizza sauce LEAGUE OF LEGENDS LAUNCHER SUCKS
but a more pb2 style example would be a quite good and popular game, escape from tarkov, where the netcode is shit and hits dont register and people deliciously exquisite pizza sauce teleport, its really similar to pb2 but its a super realistic FPS and that really kills the immersion, i wont even mention how hackers n such also affects games, i do agree this all is unpleasant but its not the reason the game goes to shit or why people stop playing games, i think the netcode change was a big deal in pb2s case because it changed how combat worked p much and that is something people often dislike, mostly considering higher ping players literally had an advantage
but people seem to only see whats negative when it comes to pb2, see pb2 has never rly had big issues with hackers and such, because of the netcode that does take care of it, mostly the new one
This isn't an issue with the game being mismanaged or not advertised enough, there just isn't money in flash games anymore and that's probably why Coolbuddy is cutting their spending. The kids who would've been playing flash games 10 - 15 years ago are now mainly mobile games or free to play stuff like Fortnite or Dota 2 or whatever. I'm not a game developer guy but I'm pretty sure that's where the money is these days.
i disagree, ROTMG aka realm of the mad god was a flash game, it was added to steam and it did kinda turn on its back and still has a decent playerbase and such, this happened a while ago, pb2 didnt do that and look at it now, if you compare both games you can see, just adding pb2 to steam and allowing people to play it from there wouldve been poggers into getting new plaeyrs in, a lot of people cant rly run the fancy 3d games like fortnite, and a lot of these use steam and play like some indie games like terraria and some crappy shooters that appear there from time to time or weird stuff like unturned, pb2 couldve got that audience in the game, but eric didnt do that, the launcher as in how pb2 works rn also could work for steam (a lot of steam games do have launchers, war thunder, lotr online, and many others)
BUT YES, mobile is the biggest market, ur right on this, the numbers wont ever be as high as they were in the past, mostly after flash's death, this is kinda impossible for pb2 but... eric, if ur reading this, what if you make pb2.5/3 able to run on mobile as well? controls shouldnt be an issue i mean deliciously exquisite pizza sauce league of legends now has a mobile version called wild rift, if that game a deliciously exquisite pizza sauce moba moba being a genre that came from rts which is way more complicated to play n execute is playable on mobile in a decent way, i think pb2.5/3 also can, keep that in mind
also im kind of a game dev guy it isnt my career but i have it as a hobby im currently working in a game and have been for a while and i had game dev classes a few years ago and i know a few game devs as well so yeah im p sure about what im saying
Personally I wouldn't pay money for stuff like merch, skins or rainbow coloured usernames. While I'm sure some people would, the community is too small for this to be a reliable source of income. I'm also sure some of you would be willing to donate money, but again this wouldn't be reliable enough to run a business on. Like phsc said, you need a consistent stream of income and I don't see where that could come from.
theres another thing, eric never rly made money out of pb2 and its quite clear he has a real time job, servers arent that expensive mostly if they dont have a big load, and this is pb2s case, theres no reason to be able to have 1000 players online, maybe in the future when 2.5 releases or whatever, just hold the money n work w smaller values for the website (website hosting can be quite cheap!), however its prob a good mkove to keep the current stuff because moving all the data from pb2s current servers to different ones would be living hell
No offense to this game, but there's just no way it could work on a subscription when so many other games which aren't janky 2d flash games from 10 years ago are free to play. So unless someone is willing to front the server costs themselves, It's just not viable. I dunno, I'd like someone to prove me wrong because I like this community a lot, but Plazma Burst 2 and flash games in general have been on a slow steady decline for years now.
i dont think the idea of the post was to like say pb2 is going to work in a paid subscription like a ton of idk MMORPGs do, the idea is to have some paid stuff, if the idea is to have an actual paid subscription it is really dumb, but like something like a battle pass or some VIP system or whatever could work, some people get their fancy nicknames and skins (emphasis on the skins! not rly possible for pb2 but 2.5/3 its a good idea), turns out ROTMG has that! i think at least, it also has an ingame currency that you can pay and it does give you better items and such theres also some visual stuff i think, and the game works, theres no need to make it p2w in pb2s case, just fancy skins (that can turn kinda p2w in some cases but its really minor anyway)
IforgotmypasswordHaHAA wrote:As someone pointed out, even with a paid subscription model it's not possible to cover the server costs, so my idea is trying to reduce said server costs by any means possible. I'm not sure about how montlhy server costs are measured so assuming server costs get reduced by ''reducing space'' these are my suggestions:
idk who said that? anyway eric himself didnt, but heres the thing, i myself have a website (
https://phscdev.com/ btw its heavily in work in progress but it exists and i did some stuff w it but its not relevant here) and considering how much i pay for it and the total traffic it could have its absurdly cheap, i know people who own bigger websites which had activity to the level of pb2 currently has and its quite cheap to keep, the ingame servers are hard to judge but it shouldnt be much i think? anyway reducing space isnt a big issue, space in general isnt, the big issue is traffic as in amounts, like 50000 people opening any page is much worse than 5000 people, the amount of pages matters little or whatever, this is just stored and hosted and its only really used when someone wants to check such a page, most of these like forum ones are barely used anyway and generally the total data hosting services have is quite absurd, anyway what does pb2 run anyway? a VPS could take care of the current traffic i am pretty sure? its quite expensive to keep one but wouldnt eric profit a lot out of having it? what about one of these that are like just a portion of a VPS? considering he could use it for pb2 and that new game i forgot the name and of course pb2.5/3 etc it could easily take care of that and 2.5/3 could pay it back up if eric like adds it to steam or something
another thing, the quality of the netcode isnt much about how good the servers are, mostly about how good the programming behind the servers are, this is another thing, optimization is key, too much work for pb2 but for 2.5/3 or that new game of his? that could be very viable and prob already is